Hi Trench, it’s my first time reading your section. While I’ll admit there’s a lot of racism in the USA, your example here doesn’t hold up. Elian Gonzales got lots of attention when he was deported to Cuba. I think it more likely we’re seeing a media filter about publishing bad news about Hispanics. The media seems to be pro-illegal-immigrant and pro-amnesty along with most mainstream politicians. The fascination with beautiful little white children is a separate phenomenon, but not surprising considering white is the “dominant culture” these days.

Maybe it’s location. I live in a border state. Hispanic people make the news all the time because 1. there are loads of them here and 2. they’ve always been here. In fact, your basic “Mexican” is probably closer to what we consider “Native American” here. Yup, the brown skin, the mesoamerican features, squat and compact bodies, see the border didn’t exist up till a couple hundred years ago. Know how many languages are spoken in Arizona alone? I can think of 6 off the top of my head…..not the worst example of an integrated and diverse state come to think of it. Which not many people do around here. Maybe the symptom of a diverse yet harmonious community is you just don’t really think about it much. Like in the course of daily life. Most people here are for strong borders and getting control of the illegal situation but we don’t sit around talking about “those people”. It’s more likely a historic Arizona family is intermarried with people of native or Mexican descent.

Or that’s the way it used to be. Now Phoenix is totally out of control and the state is increasingly being taken over by Californians who screwed up their own state so bad they have to come screw up ours. I really wish we had a border wall with California.

I guess interests of full disclosure compel me to admit that I pretty much fit my own case here. I’m mostly European but I also represent “Hispanic” blood as well as Native American. My “native” language is English but I speak Spanish OK. My Native American linguistic capability is mostly limited to ceremony and study. And a couple of jokes. I dunno. I guess I’m just like everybody else: I like to hang out with “my kind” of “my people”. Being a mixed-breed, there’s not too many places I feel as at home at. See, I get racism too, but I get it primarily from Native American and certain elements of the Hispanic community because I’m not respectively red or brown ENOUGH.

To make a pun, race issues are not black and white.

A kind of a funny thing is when I travel East, some people guess that I have some native or Hispanic blood in me, but out here forget it. Ever seen and FBI? A Full Blooded Indian? Only a generation or two left of them. About 2 generations and the 6 or more languages spoken in Arizona alone along with all their dialects will have become just 2: English and Spanish. But a while later, Arizona and the rest of the world will adopt another one: Mandarin. So it goes.

The only other thing I have to say is be careful to know the difference between racism and our natural herd mentality. People tend to self-segregate along many lines. Race is one of them. Culture is stronger than race but it’s one of them. Social strata within a cultural/race groups exist. People tend to hand out with their own, the people they self-identify with. I’m no different. I certainly feel “pulled” between 3 different cultures, but there’s lots of people like me who try to respect all their past and carry tradition forward into the future. The point is I might be a living example of “cultural diversity” but there’s a clear benefit to “social exclusivity”. Point of fact, if the people of the 6-or-more languages with umpti-dialects in Arizona alone don’t isolate to an extent, they will be gone real soon.

My Hopi friends tell me the language is so complex it literally takes a lifetime of study to master. The whole Hopi trip is so completely mind-bending, so totally INVOLVED it’s taken me years and years of listening just to apprehend the mere outline. Some of this stuff is so difficult to even relate in Western terms.

Dineh language is lexically not always so different from English, so there the student might get a break but just try and master the consonants. That can take years for even someone who is really good at languages. And both of these languages can be extremely figurative. Dineh, like many languages does not have a word for “airplane”, the literal translation of Chiddi na’tali is “wagon (car) that walks (runs) on sky (air)”.

But like any culture, just learning the words doesn’t do it. Remember how Hopi take a lifetime to learn the language? It’s not just a language, it’s a whole lifestyle, it’s a cosmology, it’s a prescription for what you do, it involves certain tasks of a daily basis and on a celestial calendar basis and the basis for your whole life from emergence to passage and beyond.

So naturally, with all the “diversity training” going on in schools and contemporary culture, you can imagine how many of us look upon this with a sense of horror. “Integration” is well known to us. “Cultural genocide” is an interchangeable term.

Perhaps interestingly, “traditional conservatives” in the Western political sense are closest to being able to comprehend and respect this in essence, which is in fact a “traditional conservative” viewpoint in a Native American sense. Equal protection under law should exist but if white society wants to confine themselves to their gated communities and shopping malls and traditional native people want to be left alone on the land, we might just have found a balance here. We’ll be forever connected by martial and familial ties, I’m proof.

Liberals seem to have a double standard when it comes to native culture. Everything that is wrong for a politically correct white man to do, we get to do with glee. We get to hunt animals out of season, we get to be promiscuous (every hetero liberal gal wants to get with a Native American guy i the worst way), we get to dance, skip church, spit, fart and we seem to be historically forgiven in liberal culture for what dominant culture calls robbery, murder, abduction, rape and torture. But the chief characteristic of liberalism seems to be proscription. “Everything would be ok if everybody was just like me” or “everything would be ok if we were all the same”.

Man, let me tell you something. Everything would SUCK BONES if we were all the same. Especially all the same as dominant culture and double especially if we’re all going to be liberals. For one thing, contradictory as my life is, I SO DO NOT WANT TO BE YOU. And, tender-hearts, YOU SO DO NOT WANT TO BE ME. At least you “Wonderbreads” are ensconced in your dominant culture. You can be 100% you. Us mixed-breeds will never be 100% part of anything or anyone. As far as human culture goes. It’s just the way it goes.

It kind of sucks. I’ve had 2 teachers in the Native Ways in my life, one as a kid, one as a young man. Both are passed over. Without them, I’ll never get to the top-level inner-circle. But on the other hand, who cares? I mean, I get to do stuff they can’t do. I make dealing with dominant culture look easy to them. I got that white fire in me too. I like doing business. I like being constructive. I got ambition in ways that only white people can relate to. Seriously. It’s somewhat easier maybe for me to see how the cultures are different because I can step in and out of them. And l see that they are unique and special. And that’s what makes them cool and each in their own way has something crucial to offer. I guess I could run workshops or something.

Respecting others is not looking in the mirror. A tranquil society does not mean homogeneity. Peace does not mean lack of conflict, it means the resolution of conflict. Conflict is endemic and ubiquitous in life. Destruction is endemic and ubiquitous in life.

So I might as well preach since I been dancing on the edges up till now. Perhaps if Western dominant culture had more of a sense of the Hoop, the Sacred Circle of life. I’d like to tell that story now, but maybe you can tell that Native stories all go in circles (whereas dominant culture’s stories are all linear) and I could go on like this….for many days and nights. So I’ll wrap up with something reassuring because we see you as being primarily preoccupied and running around willy-nilly and this is because you are either afraid or you don’t understand.

The one thing we all are 100% is organic. We all belong to this planet. This planet is our home. We are humans and this planet is our home. We were born here. We belong here. Each and every one of us. And that includes you. Not just you, Trench, everybody who might read this….and everyone who doesn’t.

Anyone who feels spoken to and needs follow up, I’m Oyate (at the grand old domain) RestoreTheRepublic (and a little dot) com. And believe me, now is the time.

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It was the 9-1-1 call that ripped my heart apart. It would not have mattered what race that child was.

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